Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon! - The German Occupation of Europe Klaus Barbie age 16 Nikolaus Klaus Barbie was born on the 25 October 1913 in Bad Godesberg a small town next to the Rhine, south of Bonn Germany. His father also called Nikolaus who was an office worker then a primary school teacher at the Noder school, where the younger Barbie was also a pupil. Barbie’s father fought in the First World War where he was wounded at Verdun, hit by a bullet in his neck, he returned home a bitter dejected man. In 1923 Barbie was accepted into the Friedrich – Welhelm grammar school in Trier, he was joined by his family in Trier in 1925 when his father retired and he moved with his wife to where Barbie was studying. In 1933 Barbie’s father and younger brother died and a year later he passed his graduation exams but with no money to continue his studies he became attracted to Nazism, and he volunteered for a six month stint in a Nazi Party voluntary work camp in Schleswig- Holstein.

On the 26 September 1935 Barbie joined the SS, membership number 272, 284 and eventually joined the SD (Sicherheitsdienst – Security Service) arm of the SS. Klaus Barbie as an SS officer His first attachment was in Berlin, as an assistant in department IV –D of the SD main office and within weeks he was posted to police headquarters in the Alexanderplatz to start training as an investigator and interrogator, which he was to put into brutal effect during the Second World War. After service in the Berlin vice squad he was transferred to Dusseldorf and in 1937 after joining the Nazi Party, and graduated from the SD school at Bernau and was sent to an exclusive leadership course in Berlin Charlottenburg. For three months from September 1938 he served with the 39th Infantry Regiment before returning to Charlottenburg for his final training and exams. On 20 April 1940 he graduated and was promoted to SS –Untersturmfuhrer and five days later he married Regine Willms, a stocky twenty-three year old daughter of a postal worker from Osburg.

Almost immediately after the wedding Barbie rejoined his SD detachment and was part of von Runstedt’s army invading the Low Countries and France. Barbie was officially posted to Holland on the 29 May 1940, Barbie’s SD unit was under the direct command of Willy Lages, the SD commander in the Hague, and his unit was shortly afterwards transferred to the Zentralstelle in Amsterdam, the “Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration.” Barbie’s responsibilities included rounding up German émigrés, freemasons and Jews. On the 12 February 1941, the German authorities used the death of a Dutch Nazi, Hendrik Koot killed in a fight with Dutch dockworkers, as a pretext to seal off the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. Abraham Asscher & David Cohen on right On 19 February 1941 an SD raid in Amsterdam entered a tavern called Koco, run by Jewish refugees from Germany, Cahn and Kohn. In the tavern, a protective device which Cahn had installed, an ammonia flash went off by accident, spaying the Germans with ammonia.

The SD raid was commanded by Klaus Barbie and after some violence everyone inside was arrested and three days later, as a reprisal for his act of “resistance” , the SS raided the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, seized 425 Jews, most of them young men. They were assembled on the Jonas Daniel –Meyer –plein subjected them to beatings and abuse and then on 27 February 1941 deported 389 of them to Buchenwald concentration camp and after two months 361 of them were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and certain death. The arrests were followed by a general strike, Barbie was ordered to execute Cahn and his associates, who had been condemned to death. Barbie was put in charge of the execution squad. Hotel Terminus in Lyon “One of the condemned asked to hear an American hit record and then we shot them.” On the 14 May 1941 a bomb was thrown into a Germans officers club in Amsterdam, and the German authorities decided the Jews should suffer as a reprisal.

Barbie went to the offices of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam met Abraham Asscher and David Cohen and Barbie tricked them into providing a list of 300 Jewish young men, on the basis they could return to the training camp and complete their apprenticeships. Asscher and Cohen were summonsed to see SD Commander Lages room and were told the boys had been arrested as a reprisal for the bomb attack. Asscher and Cohen were taken out of the building past those Jewish boys who had been arrested. All the Jews were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp where they all died before the end of the year. Just days after this coup, Barbie’s daughter, Ute Regine, was born in Trier. After a brief spell on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1942 he was recalled to Berlin to the French town of Gex, which is located on the border with Switzerland to carry out a kidnap attempt which never materialised. On the 11 November 1942 the German army crossed the demarcation line into the Vichy zone, and Barbie arrived in Lyons as head of the Gestapo.

The first SD commander for Lyons and the region was Rolf Muller, but he was transferred in early 1943 to Marseille. His position was filled temporarily by Fritz Hollert, who was replaced in the summer by Dr Werner Knab, a thirty-four year old lawyer born in Munich. Knab arrived directly from Kiev in Russia, where he had commanded the areas SS and SD forces. During his time in Kiev he was responsible for the murders of countless Jews, and gypsies and communists, anyone the Nazis thought inferior, and he arrived in Lyons without any feelings for human life. He spoke both French and English and was completely dedicated to the course. The Gestapo eventually selected the Hotel Terminus next to Perrache railway station until June 1943 when they moved into the vast Ecole de Sante Militaire on the Avenue Berholet. Section IV, the Gestapo, was headed by Barbie, he divided his own department into six sub-sections specialising in: Initially approximately twenty-five German officers worked directly under him. His leadership was efficient, dynamic and totally uncompromising.

On the 7 June 1943 Rene Hardy code-named “Didot,” head of the Resistance’s railway sabotage, boarded a train bound for Paris at the Perrache railway station in Lyons. His journey was cut short when he was arrested by the Gestapo eighty miles further on at Chalons –sur- Saone. Two weeks after Hardy was arrested resistance leader Jean Moulin was captured at a resistance meeting in a doctor’s surgery in a big villa in Caluire, a suburb of Lyons and arrested by Barbie and died soon after that. The part played by Hardy in the betrayal and arrest of Jean Moulin, is still the matter of bitter dispute. During the interrogations at the Ecole de Sante, someone revealed Moulin’s true identity, and he was brought from Montluc prison to the Gestapo headquarters for his first interrogation with Klaus Barbie. Christian Pineau, the unofficial prison barber was ordered to shave Jean Moulin who was stretched out motionless on a bench: “He had lost consciousness; his eyes were hollowed as if they were buried in his head. He had an ugly bluish wound on his temple. A low moan escaped from his swollen lips.

There was no doubt that he had been tortured by the Gestapo. Seeing me hesitate, the officer said again, “Shave him!” I asked for some soap and water. A telegram from the German security police (SD) regarding the deportation of a Jewish home for children in Lyon to the Drancy camp in Paris The officer brought some and then went away. Slowly I tried to shave him, trying not to touch the swollen parts of his face. I couldn’t understand why they wanted to put on this macabre performance for a dying man. When I’d finished I just sat next to him. Suddenly Moulin asked for some water. I gave him a drink, then he spoke in a croaking voice a few words in English which I didn’t understand. Soon after he lost consciousness, I just sat with him, a sort of “death watch” until I was taken back to my cell.” Gottlieb Fuchs the official interpreter of the Lyons Gestapo claimed that on the 25 June 1943 he witnessed Barbie drag a lifeless body down the steps to a basement in the Ecole de Sante. Fuchs later discovered that this victim was Moulin.

The Gestapo in the Avenue Foch in Paris ordered that all those arrested in Lyons should be brought to Paris for further investigations. Moulin was taken by Barbie at the end of June 1943. Moulin was taken to a large villa in Neuilly which had been requisitioned by General Bomelberg, the head of the Gestapo in France, and interrogated at the Avenue Foch. On the 7 July an unconscious body on a stretcher was placed on a military train bound for Frankfurt-am –Main, Germany. Moulin was dead on arrival. Two days later the body was brought back to Paris and cremated at Pere Lachaise. Barbie returned to Lyons and Raymond Aubrac one of those arrested in Caluire still remained in his care, and Barbie tortured him with unbridled ferocity. Aubrac recalled: “Looking back, I sometimes even think that he wasn’t that interested in getting any information. Fundamentally he was a sadist who enjoyed causing pain and proving his power. He had an extraordinary fund of violence. Coshes, clubs and whips lay on his desk and he used them a lot.

Contrary to what some others say, he wasn’t even a good policeman, because he never got any information out of me. Not even my identity, or that I was Jewish.” Raymond Aubrac was rescued by members of the Resistance recruited by his courageous wife Lucie and they were both able to escape to England. On the 30 March 1944 Lisa Lesevere was arrested carrying a letter addressed to man called “Didier” a low ranking resistance member responsible for dead letterboxes. Brought before Barbie, the brutal Gestapo chief asked her to give him the real name of “Didier.” Lesevere pretended not to understand, thus Barbie began hitting the young woman and then summoned four assistants, including the infamous “Gueule Tordue”. This was Francois Andre an ex-communist, whose face had been deformed in a road accident, his mouth was twisted into the shape of a gaping wound. Lesevere was hung from the ceiling by her wrists and beaten. The following day she was undressed, beaten and pushed into a bath. She fainted was revived by a doctor, to find Barbie and his agents laughing and offering a drink as if nothing had happened. For nineteen days, the torture sessions continued.

When her tortures temporarily ceased, she was forced to watch others suffer, including her own fifteen-year old son, whom Barbie had discovered. His parting words to his mother were, “Don’t forget that I am very soft.” As the brutalities intensified, so did her resolve against divulging anything. But then after a mock execution, Barbie revealed that another girl from her own network had betrayed her. Lesevere was tied, stomach- down onto an upturned chair, and “Gueule Tordue” began hitting her with a spiked ball hung from a cosh. Her vertebral column was broken and she fainted. Her first image, when she awoke, lying on the floor, were the legs of a young girl and the sound of her playing Chopin’s “L’Heroique” on the piano. Barbie leaned over her, stroking her hands. “What you have done is magnificent, my dear. Nobody has held out as long as you. It’s nearly over now. I’m very upset. But let’s finish. Go on, a little effort. Who is “Didier?” Lesevere said nothing.

Hitting her on the face, Barbie shouted, “I don’t want to see this stupid young woman anymore. Get rid of her!” On the 6 April 1944 a squad of a dozen German soldiers led by Gestapo officers and milice drove from Lyons to the tiny and isolated village of Izieu. Local milice had allegedly heard from Henri Bourdon, a local farmer, that for the past year the village’s largest house had been used as a school and refuge for Jewish children, aged from three to fourteen. The school’s director Miron Zlatin was told by the Germans that the children were to be evacuated for their own safety. Fearing the worst he tried to dissuade the Gestapo officers from taking the children, having failed he told the children to pack their belongings and climb into the waiting lorries. There is no reliable confirmation that Barbie was present when the home at Izieu, but his involvement in the subsequent deportation is beyond doubt: At 8.10 that evening, a telex signed personally by Barbie was sent to Gestapo headquarters in Paris: The Jewish children’s home in Izieu (Ain) was closed down this morning.

A total of 41 children aged 3 to 13 were arrested. Additionally, all the Jewish personnel – comprising ten people, including five women – were also arrested. -Signed: Barbie After leaving France Barbie returned to Germany and was posted to Halle, for front-line service. He fled the fighting and went to Berlin and then onto Dusseldorf. Barbie himself recalled how the war ended for him: “My war ended in Wuppertal. We turned a garage into a stronghold. Nearby were two trucks loaded with civilian clothes for the Werewolf’s (the abortive German resistance movement). But no one had made any plans to continue the fight underground, probably because no one thought that we would lose the war. So I buried my gun. The four youngsters I was with and myself changed our clothes, got some false papers from the police headquarters and headed off through the forests and pastures towards the Sauerland. It was very hard. From one day to the next, I’d become a beggar.” His luck ran out and he was arrested at an American roadblock near Hohenlimburg, where he was locked up in a school, but was soon released.

Barbie began working for the CIC in spring 1947, he was protected by American intelligence agents because of his “police skills” and anti-communist zeal – he was successful in penetrating communist cells in post-war Germany. With the aid of the Americans he fled in 1950 to escape prosecution in France and relocated to Bolivia, South America together with his wife and children. He lived in Bolivia as a businessman under the name of Klaus Altmann, though he was identified in Bolivia in the early 1970’s by the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, it was only in February 1983 that the Bolivian government, after long negotiations, extradited Barbie to France to stand trial for war crimes. On the 3 July 1987 Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. Nine jurors and three judges found Barbie – known as the “Butcher of Lyons” – guilty of the 341 separate charges that were brought against him at the court in Lyon. The 73-year old former Gestapo chief was accused of deporting 842 people – mainly Jews – to concentration camps during the Second World War.

Klaus Barbie died of cancer in prison on the 25 September 1991. Nazi “Butcher of Lyon” was a German intelligence agent - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Nazi “Butcher of Lyon” was a German intelligence agent By Dietmar Henning 22 January 2011 Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal infamously known as the “Butcher of Lyon”, was an agent of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in the 1960s. This was revealed recently by the news magazine Der Spiegel. Adopting the name Klaus Altmann at the time, Barbie operated under the code name “Eagle” (agent number V-43118) and provided the BND with at least 35 political reports in 1966. His payment for this—up to DM 500 (deutschmarks)—was transferred to him via a branch of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco. BND files praised the “quintessentially German attitude” of this “decisive enemy of communists”.

At the turn of 1966-67, the BND terminated contact with its source, Barbie alias Altmann, paying him a final cash settlement of DM 1,000. This last point was discovered by a history student at the University of Mainz, Peter Hammerschmidt. He is currently working on a degree thesis entitled “‘The Butcher of Lyon’ in the pay of the United States: Concerning the relations between Klaus Barbie and the American secret service”. In September, Hammerschmidt was able to view Barbie’s BND file as part of his scientific work and released his findings about Barbie’s BND past earlier this year. As a captain in the SS (Hitler’s elite force) from 1940 to 1942, Klaus Barbie tortured and murdered people in the German occupied Netherlands and Belgium. During this time, he was “head of Jewish affairs in the main office of the Reich (empire) Security Department” in The Hague. From November 1942, he was chief of the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) in Lyon in the area of southern France administered by the pro-fascist Vichy regime of General Petain.

His horrifically cruel crimes committed there earned him the title “Butcher of Lyon”. His victims were workers, peasants and members of the resistance—including Jean Moulin, whose arms, legs and ribs were broken in the course of daily interrogations. Women were beaten unconscious, raped and sodomised. Thousands of men and women were tortured, sent to extermination camps or killed by Barbie. These included 41 Jewish children from Izieu, France, aged 3 to 13, whose deportations were arranged by Barbie on April 6, 1944. They died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Towards the end of 1944, Barbie suddenly disappeared, going into hiding somewhere in Germany shortly before the end of war. Accused of numerous crimes, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the French authorities for the first time in 1947, and again in 1952 and 1954 following the discovery of further crimes. However, the wanted war criminal was protected by both the intelligence service of the US army, its Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), and the German authorities.

Hammerschmidt claims that Barbie’s name appeared on the CIC’s payroll in April 1947, although it had been on the allies’ wanted list in the spring of 1946. This saved him from extradition to France and he was able to live in Germany undisturbed. As an agent of the CIA from 1950, Barbie recruited members for the far-right League of German Youth (BDJ) that was later to be banned. The BDJ was the German vanguard organisation of the infamous Gladio NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) troops in Europe. This paramilitary organisation with close ties to extreme right-wing terrorists was set up to carry out sabotage and assassinations behind enemy lines in the event of an attack from the Soviet Union. Aided by the US in 1951, Barbie emigrated to Bolivia under the name of Klaus Altmann via the so-called “rat lines”. Unlike many other war criminals in South America, Barbie did not simply disappear from the scene, but rose to the position of official adviser to Bolivia’s right-wing military dictatorships.

Operating from the army’s headquarters, he passed on experience acquired in Lyon that was useful to members of the military secret service in their suppression of political opposition: “interrogation techniques”, “torture methods” and “anti-guerrilla tactics”. Under René Barrientos Ortuno’s military junta, Barbie rose to the post of military advisor for counterinsurgency in 1964-65, receiving a diplomatic passport in 1966. At the same time, Barbie managed a sawmill under the name of Altmann. He became rich owing to the Vietnam War, when he sold vast quantities of cinchona plant—the raw material for the antimalarial analgesic quinine—to the German chemical company Böhringer in Mannheim. He was simultaneously involved in the arms and drug trades. From the mid- to late 1960s, the Butcher of Lyon travelled to South American countries and to Spain and Portugal, supplying their respective dictatorships with weapons. After Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez’s bloody CIA-backed coup in 1971, Barbie was promoted to a paid consultant to the interior ministry and counter-espionage division of the Bolivian army.

In addition, he established his own paramilitary force, which he used to support the military coup by General Luis García Meza in 1980. During the rule of President Hernán Siles Zuazo two-and-a-half years later, the Bolivian police arrested Barbie on January 19, 1983. In the same year, he was extradited to France and brought to court in Lyon. According to Hammerschmidt, who was also able to carry out research in the US National Archives (NARA) in Washington, a CIA document from December 1983 mentions that the prevailing French government of Francois Mitterrand—for domestic political reasons—had purchased Barbie’s sudden extradition from Bolivia with weapons: small arms, machine guns, antitank weapons and ammunition. Barbie was accused of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment on July 4, 1987. He died in prison in 1991. The shared history of German intelligence and the CIA The close cooperation between Barbie and the CIA has been known for some time. What is new is that the Nazi criminal was also on the payroll of the BND.

This is not so surprising, however, because the BND was established by US intelligence agencies. In the last years of the Second World War, German politicians as well as generals and officers of the army were preparing themselves for the German defeat. They were banking on the mutual hostility of the US, France and Great Britain to the Soviet Union. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the right-wing bourgeois politician, former mayor of Leipzig and long-time advisor to Hitler—also one of the “men of July 20” who attempted to assassinate Hitler—wrote in a memorandum to the generals on March 26, 1943: “The two Anglo-Saxon empires share, as does Germany, the vital interest that Bolshevism does not penetrate further to the west. Only Germany can stop the spread of Bolshevism. If Germany is weakened by losses from the war and an unfavourable peace treaty, then Bolshevism will find it easier, perhaps all too easy, to make its way west …” Towards the end of World War II and immediately afterwards, the US was particularly intent on gaining access to the Nazis’ scientific and technical knowledge. During the Cold War, it maintained an extensive spy network with the help of ex-Nazis.

Particularly important in this respect was the role of Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief of military intelligence on the Eastern Front. From 1942 to 1945, he headed the general staff’s espionage division “Foreign Armies in the East”. Gehlen had kept his files safely stored in the belief that he could pass them on to the US after the war, thereby continuing the “fight against Bolshevism” to Germany’s advantage—and his own. “In a Europe arming itself in defence against communism, Germany would again be able to find its place”, writes Gehlen in his memoirs. Directly after the war, he and his “Organisation Gehlen” were placed at the disposal of the US intelligence service, known then as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the CIA. Gehlen was commissioned to set up a German foreign intelligence service, which was to be directed primarily against the Soviet Union. The US was prepared to use “any bastard, as long as he was anti-communist”, as Harry Rositzke, head of CIA operations in the Soviet Union, put it. Entire leading divisions of the SS Security Service (SD) were sometimes incorporated into the BND.

The German government under Konrad Adenauer (Christian Democratic Union) was not initially informed about the CIA’s cooperation with Gehlen. Gehlen first made contact with the new federal government and the Social Democratic Party at the end of 1950. Hans Globke, Adenauer’s right-hand man, was the first to be officially associated with the general who worked with his agents in Pullach near Munich. “I immediately found a good contact and got the impression that he rightly valued the importance of my organisation”, Gehlen later wrote. Globke, a lawyer at the time, was author of the commentary on the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws published in 1936 (Commentary on German Racial Legislation, Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Munich and Berlin: 1936). By the summer of 1949, about 400 employees of the BND, most of them in senior positions, originated from the Nazis’ security apparatus. In an internal investigation in the early 1960s, approximately 200 BND staff were identified as former members of the Nazi security agencies, some of them involved in war crimes.

An estimated 25 to 30 percent of BND staff had Nazi backgrounds even into the early 1970s. Gehlen himself headed the BND until his retirement in May 1968. Gehlen, Globke and Barbie were not isolated cases. The names of senior officials, judges, public prosecutors, SS and party members from the Third Reich, all of whom continued their careers in the German Federal Republic more or less without interruption, would fill volumes. When the first German parliament assembled in West Germany, more than half the new deputies had been members of the Nazi party before 1945. The prosecution of Nazi criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie was sabotaged and thwarted. According to Hammerschmidt, one of Barbie’s relatives testified to the police in April 1961 that Klaus Barbie and his family had been taken abroad by the Americans. She named the city of La Paz in Bolivia as his place of refuge and revealed Barbie’s new name, Altmann.

However, investigations were prolonged and court proceedings were first temporarily adjourned on March 20, 1967, and finally closed by the Munich prosecutor owing to lack of evidence on June 22, 1971. The US authorities behaved no differently. Hammerschmidt claims the State Department was informed by the Pentagon in 1971 that it was “an obligation of national security to continue to keep Barbie’s files secret”. Meanwhile, leading circles in Germany regard it necessary to deal with the Nazi past of major German corporations and government agencies. According to Der Spiegel, the BND itself has been working for weeks with the historians Jost Dülffer (Cologne), Klaus-Dietmar Henke (Dresden), Wolfgang Krieger (Marburg) and Rolf-Dieter Müller (Potsdam) in relation to the history of the BND in its first decades. Allegedly, they have been given full access to all the BND files, even “secret” and “top secret” files. Advocates of “unrestricted access” to their own history are aiming to boost the clout of a German foreign policy that increasingly pursues its own imperialist interests.

This is also the reason for the publication of a committee report on the Foreign Office, commissioned by former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party). In 1952, two-thirds of the senior officials in the Foreign Office were former Nazi party members; among division heads it was four-fifths. The office supported the crimes of the Nazi regime, largely on its own initiative. (See “ The German foreign office and its defenders ”) But, as in the past, there are bound to be fierce clashes when it comes to opening up the history of the BND. Hammerschmidt says that his request for access to files at the BND was initially refused in the summer of 2010. It took an official complaint to the chancellor’s office before he was able inspect the BND’s file on Barbie a few months later. The four historians from Cologne, Dresden, Marburg and Potsdam currently cooperating with the BND will be able to see all the files, but will not be allowed to publish everything they find. The BND reserves the right to exercise a veto on the grounds of non-disclosure of classified information. Further conflicts are therefore inevitable.

Der Spiegel reports that journalist Gaby Weber recently had to lodge a complaint with the Federal Administrative Court in order to be allowed access to BND files on the Nazi mass murderer, Adolf Eichmann. However, the BND countered by appealing to the security interests of the Federal Republic of Germany—almost 50 years after Eichmann’s execution in Israel. Butcher of Lyon on trial - May 11, 1987 - HISTORY.com Butcher of Lyon on trial Share this: Butcher of Lyon on trial Author Butcher of Lyon on trial URL Publisher A+E Networks Klaus Barbie, the former Nazi Gestapo chief of German-occupied Lyon, France, goes on trial in Lyon more than four decades after the end of World War II. He was charged with 177 crimes against humanity. As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in Lyon, Barbie sent 7,500 French Jews and French Resistance partisans to concentration camps, and executed some 4,000 others. Among other atrocities, Barbie personally tortured and executed many of his prisoners. In 1943, he captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, and had him slowly beaten to death.

In 1944, Barbie rounded up 44 young Jewish children and their seven teachers hiding in a boarding house in Izieu and deported them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Of the 51, only one teacher survived. In August 1944, as the Germans prepared to retreat from Lyon, he organized one last deportation train that took hundreds of people to the death camps. Barbie returned to Germany, and at the end of the war burned off his SS identification tattoo and assumed a new identity. With former SS officers, he engaged in underground anti-communist activity and in June 1947 surrendered himself to the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) after the Americans offered him money and protection in exchange for his intelligence services. Barbie worked as a U.S. agent in Germany for two years, and the Americans shielded him from French prosecutors trying to track him down. In 1949, Barbie and his family were smuggled by the Americans to South America. Assuming the name of Klaus Altmann, Barbie settled in Bolivia and continued his work as a U.S. agent. He became a successful businessman and advised the military regimes of Bolivia.

In 1971, the oppressive dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez came to power, and Barbie helped him set up brutal internment camps for his many political opponents. During his 32 years in Bolivia, Barbie also served as an officer in the Bolivian secret police, participated in drug-running schemes, and founded a rightist death squad. He regularly traveled to Europe, and even visited France, where he had been tried in absentia in 1952 and 1954 for his war crimes and sentenced to death. In 1972, the Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and Beatte Kunzel discovered Barbie’s whereabouts in Bolivia, but Banzer Suarez refused to extradite him to France. In the early 1980s, a liberal Bolivian regime came to power and agreed to extradite Barbie in exchange for French aid. On January 19, 1983, Barbie was arrested, and on February 7 he arrived in France. The statute of limitations had expired on his in-absentia convictions from the 1950s; he would have to be tried again. The U.S. government formally apologized to France for its conduct in the Barbie case later that year.

Legal wrangling, especially between the groups representing his victims, delayed his trial for four years. Finally, on May 11, 1987, the “Butcher of Lyon,” as he was known in France, went on trial for his crimes against humanity. In a courtroom twist unimaginable four decades earlier, Barbie was defended by three minority lawyers–an Asian, an African, and an Arab–who made the dramatic case that the French and the Jews were as guilty of crimes against humanity as Barbie or any other Nazi. Barbie’s lawyers seemed more intent on putting France and Israel on trial than in proving their client’s innocence, and on July 4, 1987, he was found guilty. For his crimes, the 73-year-old Barbie was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, France’s highest punishment. He died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1991.

Related Videos Barbie Is Convicted of War Crimes : Nazi Known as 'Butcher of Lyon' Gets Life Sentence - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections Barbie Is Convicted of War Crimes : Nazi Known as 'Butcher of Lyon' Gets Life Sentence July 05, 1987 |United Press International LYON, France — Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo chief known as the "Butcher of Lyon," was convicted Friday of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. A French court returned the verdict and maximum sentence of life, despite Barbie's denials during his 8-week trial that he ordered more than 800 Jews and resistance fighters deported to face death or torture in World War II Nazi camps. Before the jury began its nearly seven hours of deliberations, presiding Judge Andre Cerdini asked Barbie whether he had anything to say in his defense. Denied Charges Saying that "the war is over," Barbie specifically denied ordering the deportation of 44 Jewish children ages 5 to 17 on April 6, 1944, from a farmhouse in the village of Izieu east of Lyon, the most emotionally charged accusation against him.

"I have several words to say in French," Barbie said in the sweltering courtroom packed with about 800 people. "I did not authorize the roundup at Izieu," he said. "I never had the power to decide deportations. "I fought the resistance, which I respect, with toughness. That was yesterday, and that was the war, and the war is over. Thank you," he said and sat down. "Thank you," Cerdini replied and began reading a list of 341 specific charges for the jurors. The prosecution demanded the maximum sentence of life in prison. Barbie's lawyer, Jacques Verges, urged acquittal. It was Barbie's first appearance at his trial since June 5. He began a boycott of the proceedings May 13 after protesting what he called his illegal 1983 expulsion from Bolivia to France. He also made an appearance May 26. France's Role Cited Verges, in a bitter 2 1/2-hour attack on France, appealed to the jury to free Barbie as a sign that France has come to grips with the ignoble role it played in its capitulation to Germany and its collaboration with Nazi occupiers.

"In the name of humanity, of law, of right and of France, acquit without delay Klaus Barbie, victim of vengeance," Verges said. "France, humanity expects something from you that is an act of age, of truth. Answer no to all the questions that you have been asked," he said. Like Barbie, he said the accused "Butcher of Lyon" was not in charge of deportations and did not know that the trains were taking the victims to death camps. The prosecution said Barbie was fully aware of the destination of the deportees, often telling them, "Where you are going is worse than death." Verges challenged the testimony of several of the 105 witnesses, many of whom have watched the trial from the front rows of the spectators' seats. One man yelled, "He's lying," and a woman, Simone La Grange, stood up to interrupt Verges but was asked to sit down. She began weeping and hugging a grandson sitting next to her.

When Verges shouted against "the absurdity" of the trial, several people in the front rows moaned and said, "No." Verges called a "crude forgery" a Telex message signed by Barbie that reported the Izieu roundup to the Paris Gestapo. It was the most damaging evidence against him. Verges said witnesses who identified Barbie as having tortured them suffered from "a failing memory." "The only eyewitness to Barbie's presence at the house of Izieu, Julien Favet, cannot be retained because he is very sick in the head . . . who remembered 40 years later what he had never said until now," Verges said, referring to a witness who suffered serious head injuries in an industrial accident. Barbie's daughter, Ute Messner, 46, was at the trial for the first time. The colonnaded courthouse was under particularly heavy security, with police sharpshooters on the roof.

MORE: Klaus Barbie | Known people - famous people news and biographies ← Carl Orff Carmen Sevilla → “butcher of Lyons” Gestapo worked for German intelligence Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (Klaus Barbie), which in 1942-44 he was the head of the Gestapo in the French Lyons, where he earned the nickname “the butcher of Lyon”, after the war worked for the German intelligence service (BND). He supplied her information from Bolivia, where he fled, hiding from justice, according to Spiegel, with reference to the disposal of the journalists got the documents. Barbier, who lived in Bolivia since 1951 under the name Klaus Altmann (Klaus Altmann), was recruited by the BND in 1966, and passed on the documents as an agent of the “Eagle”(“Adler”) under number V-43118. The characteristic notes of his”true German way of thinking”and”a strong anti-communism.” Klaus Barbie sent a German intelligence, at least 35 posts. He listed a fee through a branch in London Chartered Bank in San Francisco.

What kind of information passed on the former “butcher of Lyon”German intelligence, remains unknown. Meanwhile, according to Spiegel, a few weeks after the recruitment of Klaus Barbie became head of the Bolivian representative of one firm from Bonn, which sells abroad extra ammunition, produced for the Bundeswehr. Presumably the agent”Eagle” was to monitor the situation in the armed forces of Bolivia and to provide information on the needs Bolivian army in those or other kinds of arms. BND ceased cooperation with Klaus Barbie in winter 1966-67 years: the risk that foreign intelligence services know about the German intelligence cooperation with the former Nazi criminal was too great. By this time a French court has sentenced in absentia, “the executioner of Lyons” to the death penalty, but prosecutors Germany began its own investigation of its activities. Klaus Barbie was extradited to France in 1983 and died in a French prison in 1991. Recall that in early January it became known that the German intelligence during the eight years covered another former Nazi war criminal: hiding in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, who was involved in the deaths of 4 million Jews.

The whereabouts BND knew Eichmann in 1952, but decided not to take any action against him because of the fear that, once in the hands of justice, Eichmann might reveal compromising information about the Nazi past of the secretariat of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer Hans Globke. Eichmann was kidnapped “Mossad” from Argentina only in 1960 and executed in Israel two years later. It should be noted that the current head of the BND, Ernst Uhrlau in 2006 announced the beginning of the revision of the history of the Federal Intelligence Service. In January 2011 it became known that the BND for the first time will open all its archives to German historians. At the same time, however, for the publication of certain details need consent to BND, which can veto, if it considers that their disclosure could jeopardize national security.

It’s interesting I recommend Tweet Share BBC ON THIS DAY | 3 | 1987: Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie gets life About This Site | Text Only 1987: Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie gets life The former Gestapo chief in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. Nine jurors and three judges found Barbie - also known as the Butcher of Lyon - guilty of the 341 separate charges that were brought against him at the court in Lyon. The 73-year-old was accused of deporting 842 people - mainly Jews - to concentration camps in Germany during the Second World War. In one incident 44 children were rounded up from a farmhouse east of Lyon, at Izieu, and sent to their deaths. A total of 373 of the people transported under Barbie's command died. Surviving relatives of the victims filled the courtroom and heard Barbie's last-minute plea of innocence. France can try and shed its own responsibility Defence lawyer, Jacques Verges "Barbie has been promoted to the rank of an expiatory victim, a scapegoat so that France can try and shed its own responsibility", argued defence lawyer, Jacques Verges.

Coverage of the trial in France has been exhaustive and crowds of people waited outside the court to hear the judgement. The editor of Le Monde newspaper, Andre Fontaine, said: "It's a time in France where people are more and more conscious of the necessity of knowing something about history and especially about recent history." The man they call the Butcher of Lyon has already been condemned to death twice for his war crimes. Both of these sentences lapsed as Barbie was living under an assumed name in Bolivia. He was found by barrister Serge Klarsfeld in 1972, but it was not until over 10 years later, in 1983, that the Bolivian government agreed to extradite him. Barbie's trial began on 11 May this year with Mr Klarsfeld as chief prosecutor. It took the judges and jury six-and-a-half hours to reach their final verdict after they retired at 0530 BST (0430 GMT) today. France gripped by the trial of the Nazi, Klaus Barbie In Context Born on 25 October 1913 in Germany, Barbie was a member of the Hitler Youth.

In 1935 he joined a special branch of the SS. After serving with the German army in the Netherlands he was made chief of Gestapo Department IV in Lyon from 1942 to 1944. There is evidence that he personally tortured prisoners whom he interrogated and he is blamed for 4000 deaths and a further 7,500 deportations during the war. After the war the USA used him for counter-intelligence work (1947-51), for which they later apologised. He died in prison in Lyon on 25 September 1991.

Stories From 3 Jul Nazi war criminal Klaus Altmann worked as a drug lord fixer in South America | Daily Mail Online The second life of a Nazi war criminal: German documentary reveals how 'butcher of Lyon' Klaus Barbie became a fixer for drug lords when he went on the run in South America Barbie became known as Klaus Altmann when he went on the run in 1945 He worked as a druglord fixer in Latin America and met with Pablo Escobar General Luis García Meza was helped into power in Bolivia by drug money Barbie tortured top French resistance operatives and is estimated to have been directly involved in the deaths of 14,000 people

Question: Which prominent Nazi was known as 'The Butcher Of Lyon'?
Answer: KLAUS BARBIE